As raw material, labor and waste disposal costs escalate, technological advances provide a competitive means to increase productivity while decreasing cost. In labor intensive industries, advances in ergonomic or labor-saving technology can improve the work environment, as well as provide increased productivity and efficiency.
In the fiber glass industry, forming and roving operations, in which glass filaments and fiber strands, respectively, are wound into packages, are examples of labor intensive operations in which technological advances are needed. In the forming area, glass filaments are drawn at a high rate of speed from a fiber forming apparatus, or bushing, connected to a supply of molten glass. The filaments are gathered into one or more fibers and wound upon a rotating collet of a winder to create a forming package. During winding, a conventional collet rotates about a horizontal, longitudinal axis. Similarly, roving packages are formed by gathering a plurality of strands and winding the strands about a collet rotating about a horizontal, longitudinal axis.
Typical forming and roving packages weigh about 10 to about 250 kilograms and have diameters of about 0.18 meters to about 0.75 meters, making manual removal of the packages from the horizontal collet an unwieldy, inefficient and labor intensive process. Manual capabilities limit the practical package size when a horizontal collet is used.
It is desirable to increase package size to increase productivity and decrease waste, since the inner and outer layers of a package and product produced between winding packages (downchute waste) are typically discarded. A system is needed which facilitates winding of larger wound packages and manipulation and transportation of any size of wound package to reduce labor and waste disposal costs and increase efficiency and productivity.